


shatter

by Afueras



Category: Bandom, Placebo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-20
Updated: 2013-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-05 06:15:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1090596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Afueras/pseuds/Afueras
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I was filth incarnate. Regrets and false contrition. A being made of blood and shit, worth nothing and destined for nothingness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	shatter

**Author's Note:**

> this started as flash fiction an couple of years ago, before rapidly turning into over 5000 words. I've condensed it by nearly a half to cut out a lot of the drabble.

I was filth incarnate. Regrets and false contrition. A being made of blood and shit, worth nothing and destined for nothingness.

I was undesirable, rude, and lacking in chagrin. I was looked down on in the street with snarls and sneers and the occasional wad of spit. I was worth less than the blackened gum stuck to the pavement. I was one of God’s mistakes, a crying tragic waste of skin.

Every morning for me consisted of progressively harder substances, carried over from the night before, blurring my nights into my days and my days into my hatred and my hatred into my shattered mind. I disgusted even myself; I broke all of the mirrors I came across like the hearts that had made the mistake of coming across me.

My skin was coated with scar tissue, but the scars inside my chest were deeper.

Once I was standing on a roof when I saw dawn break, and it didn’t convince me I didn’t want to die. It just convinced me to stay inside with the curtains shut. Days should be in sepia-tones and ugly greys. My eyes hurt.

I never could stop the shake in my limbs and the waver in my broken speech. My filthy hair hung in constant ropes of undyed squalor, to match my trashy dresses and my trashy flat and the pieces of human waste that so constantly littered it.

Friends, they called themselves, when they were feeling benevolent. Rarely was I so kind.

I was my own mother and my own father. I was a child and I was too old to be alive. The mirror told me the truth when everyone else lied, but maybe my eyes were liars too. There was no one to trust, not even my own chilled hands.

The evenings were the gentlest to me, when the scorching heat or the aching cold eased into steady ambivalence, and the walls slowed their motion to soothe the constant seasickness that pulled at my stomach. Sometimes I dropped through the floor, I was so heavy. Other times I was light enough to unscrew the chandeliers and drop them to shatter on the ground, telling myself I’d clean the shards in the morning, only to find upon sunrise that I had never had chandeliers.

Life was a strung-out rush. My lungs ached and my heart worked too hard and I could feel the materialization of my anguish in my cracked cerebellum and the smell of sex under my fingernails and suddenly the torn-up wallpaper would occur to me and I would swear to fix it.

The darkest times were strangely the long morning hours, long after sunrise and stretching till noon. The bodies in my floor were gone and my hands were empty and it felt wrong to push the needle into a vein the sun shone on.

I closed the shutters and locked the doors, trash that I was, and rocketed to heaven and back, all alone.

I always thought sometime I wouldn’t make it to unlock the door, but they all knew better. Maybe they knew me better than I knew myself, or maybe they had doors of their own to unlock and days that dragged on and empty spaces where vital organs should be.

Under the fragile lacings of my own skull when I took it off at night, my mind gleamed grey and dead like the steel door of a club or the dull sparkle of an old razor or the black viscosity of my own blood as it vacated my corpse.

The sleep grew longer and longer and moments of sobriety were few and far between. My skin felt like paper and the makeup, like a mask covering my torn visage, was a permanent fixture, an indefinite promise of someday taking it off. I broke that promise before it passed through my lips, or before I passed from the womb. I never would take off my many masks, because I was afraid that underneath them, there was nothing at all.

So I was blood and shit and I was bile and filth and the world was this shining golden thing I couldn’t reach, and then there was him.

There was a tube station and a concrete floor and someone’s torn stockings on thin legs that may have been mine. There was someone hysterical, having a bad trip, that was probably not me. It couldn’t have been – I could hear them screaming. Can you hear yourself? I never could before.

People laughed, maybe. People cringed, definitely. There were voices blending with mine in what couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination be called a symphony, not even an overture, when suddenly long fingers were wrapping around my skeletal arms like ropes and I was dragged away, passing through a dozen realities before being dumped in one I couldn’t possibly accept.

Someone’s clean and furnished flat. Someone’s expensive cup in my shaking hand. Someone’s pristine sofa behind my filthy back and under my bouncing knee.

He said he remembered me from school, but I didn’t remember school. I remembered being born and I remembered dying, but I didn’t remember school. I told him so and he laughed for a long time. He didn’t care about my dystopian mindscape or my nerve degeneration. He cared nothing for my constantly weeping eyes. He gave me tissues.

He talked and I listened and he must have said his name a thousand times, but I never understood it. The words flowed like water from a faucet and I could only watch the faucet, which was the bow of his lips.

There were years I couldn’t account for and there were scars I couldn’t remember and there was my one blind eye that I couldn’t remember being born that way, or not. There were always people in places I didn’t remember them being. There were locks I couldn’t open with the key in my hand, and there were whole days that I spent studying a single brick in the wall.

Him, though, I never forgot. 

I jumped on him when he came to see me and I grew to be less afraid of his pretentious neighbors, though I still hid behind him when their stares started to burn my skin. It only made him smile.

He didn’t care that I forgot his birthday and that I sometimes still forgot his name and that sometimes he had to carry me because I was too deep in the ocean of my own psyche to touch the surface. When my head lolled over his arm, he touched the curves of my neck, and I never knew whether he was aware that I could feel it.

We never did normal things or went normal places. We went to parks when I was desperate for the needle, and he made me sit on low walls with him and he let me squirm into his shoulder and say words that made no sense. I didn’t know if my words ever made sense, but they did in my head, and he never commented. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure whether or not I was talking. 

He took me to clinics, too – cold white places that made my skin hurt with people who asked questions I couldn’t hear and wanted to do things to me. He said to let them, and I did, and then he would let me lie on his pristine couch while he trailed his fingers down my sharp spine and the TV buzzed and crackled and my breaths were short and harsh and his were slow and deep.

There were bad days, like when I shed my dress in front of him without a second thought and he stared and then grabbed me softly, but hard enough that it hurt all the way through to my solar plexus and he shouted at me, and then I didn’t remember anything else but later he told me he was okay. He probably wasn’t okay. I couldn’t remember. I was made of blood and shit. I was toxic human waste. I would poison him and he would die and it would be because of me; I was nothing to him and I was nothingness incarnate. My bathroom floor was cool and good against my hot cheeks, and the gaps between the tiles carried fluid like aqueducts to hydrate my splintered throat and my blown-up skull.

My hands were always so cold I felt like I could freeze my own tears with them and use the teardrops as ammunition against the stares that always stopped my heart in the street.

The sky was so cornflower-pale and my dress was so dark, sticky ragged velvet that showed off a walking skeleton with no face, in my bare feet and my shaky hands and my one blind, drooping eye. It was always too silent, like an action film with the sound turned off.

People rushed around me and the bridge was cold, so I oozed down the wall like the slime I was and crumpled on the ground. My world was made of breathing and the steady pressure in my bladder.

I liked those tights. The thought burst through my ruined brain like a ray of sunlight and I struggled to my feet to find a bathroom. I liked those tights

The mirror in the bathroom was one I couldn’t break so I broke my fingers instead, one by one, until they wouldn’t clench around my tired limp cock and piss soaked the grungy floor, and then I was on the floor, and it hurt because I liked those tights.

I had a seizure, and I knew it was a seizure, because I wasn’t quite far enough gone to not know I had seizures, and then I wanted him and wished I hadn’t ever left. Did I leave, or did he? I was the one on the street, away from my peeling wallpaper and benevolent floor-people. It must have been me.

There was something happening, tears running down my ugly face and dripping onto the exposed ribs in my chest, and I wanted to pluck them out one by one and build something with them. Something that would last.

So I limped back and he was waiting and even though I didn’t know how long it had been and I still couldn’t remember his name, he let me sit on his lap, and he told me that the clinics had called him and told him things. I didn’t know what things, nor did I care. He was warm, and the clinics and the street and my flat weren’t. I didn’t want to go back to the doctors and the touching and the claustrophobic, tubular machine that sounded like a jackhammer and made me scream and cry.

My head still hurt and my hands hurt, and we went back to the clinic, but I didn’t remember it. After that we were sitting on a park bench and he was talking to me, telling me it was important, but he stopped talking so I could smell his throat.

I did listen, and I tried to remember. I was sick. Brain something. Hurt. I needed something and something else, and I should stop my extracurricular activities – the ones I put in the needle and the ones I put in my nose and other places, that the floor people always had more of and that made the walls breathe and made my hands steadier for a while.

I tried to ask him if he knew. It took me a long time to get the words to spill out, if they ever spilled out; he might have just read my mind. He said he didn’t understand, so I tried to make him understand, about the tube station and about me. If he knew. If he knew then, about me. What I was. Why he had picked me.

He still didn’t understand, and I couldn’t make him, and then I forgot my question. Somewhere in my fractured cerebrum, though, the question still rotated: did he know I was sick when we met, and was pity the only reason he approached me?

Did it matter? His lips were warm on my forehead. I was trash and filth and he was honey and light. I knew I would sully him with the emptiness of my presence but I couldn’t possibly question him, not after everything. Not after him dragging me, the waste of skin, from the gutter and wrapping those long fingers around my willow-branch arms and pressing his fingers through my stringy hair to make it lie flat.

I choked on spit and he was there, and I choked on words and on my tortured vision as the pain doubled and then tripled in my gut, as I sweated through the fever dreams and vomited on his fingers while he tried to push food down my throat. I barely remembered, barely even knew.

He didn’t leave me. He made me stop, or they made me stop, I don’t know. I didn’t see my flat anymore. We went away to a different city with new doctors whose cold fingers were more gentle. More like his. Stefan’s. I could remember his name most of the time.

We breathed in sequence, he and I, and the days were shorter than they had ever been. It was all a crystal blur that ended in hurting and soothing and sleep, with his arm around my narrow shoulders and a bin beside the bed for when I woke to vomit over the side.

I started to remember more things. School was still an enigma wrapped in solid confusion – had I been young once? – but the wallpaper in my flat had been a color called yellow and the dresses he never once discouraged me from wearing stayed cleaner than they had and I knew his name. Stefan.

He said it would be worth it. That the hurting now would be worth it because I would be able to remember things and not forget where I was as much and that once I felt a little better we could go places and do things and be normal. He didn’t understand, though. I didn’t mind not being normal. I minded the heavy stones of disgust that still weighed down my stomach, and I minded his tears when the doctors made me cry, but nothing else. The hurting was okay. I wasn’t living for the sheer principle of remaining alive, anymore. I wasn’t living because he was there and even though I still didn’t know why, I still didn’t care.

I was beginning to care. The sicker I got and the better I got and the more medications they gave me that pressed on my body like a heavy fog but left my shattered mind painfully clear, the less I understood.

I knew by then that he was rich from inheritance, though I wasn’t sure how to say the word without it spewing out in a flood of misplaced vowels.

Something in me still told me all the time that I was filth and trash, blood and shit, a waste of skin. I was regret and disgust and poor choices and retroactive good intentions and I was a mistake and I was a problem and I should have been dead; I should have been dead a long time ago and all of this was a dream I would wake up from, only I wouldn’t know it because I would be an addict again.

Why me? He said I was sweet, sometimes. I did want to be sweet. He said I was sweet.

Sometimes I still forgot his name.

By now I can feed myself at regular intervals. I can swallow my medication. I can talk without slurring too much and even though my mind often derails at the speed of a bullet train, I can usually keep up with basic conversation.

Stefan and I live in a small house just outside the city, and within a short drive of my doctors. He could afford a big house, but we didn’t need it. He nailed the windows shut so I didn’t forget and wander away. He hung the key to the front door out of my reach, like a child. There is no knob on the bathroom door. Despite all of that, I don’t mind.

We’ve had sex precisely twice, in eight months. He doesn’t want to because I can’t get an erection. I’ve told him a dozen times that I want it anyway, but he says no and I say okay, or I don’t say anything, or I forget what I’ve said and stand there looking lost until he repeats it to me with a patience I’ll never understand in my hasty heart and still-broken mind.

Chronic brain damage. That’s what they say I have. I made Stefan say it a thousand times over so that maybe I would remember. I don’t remember much, but I know his name, and I know that mine is Brian, and I have brain damage, and my hair is clean and my hands don’t shake so much anymore, and what started as anger and confusion ended here with Stefan and a new sort of confusion. Like a child, he said. Like a different child than before.

So be it. I’m tired, and it’s time to sleep. The sunrise will be beautiful, and I will see it in color, with the curtains wide open.

**Author's Note:**

> Brian's brain damage isn't very well explained because he doesn't understand it. In real life, long-term brain injuries vary and so does the individual's level of functionality.
> 
> There were two versions of this saved on my computer; a sappy one with this ending and one with an unpleasant ending, which I thought was a lot better. This is kind of an ugly hybrid of the two, with the sappy, stupid ending. I don't think it worked out very well but I'm so tired everything's a little blurry and this will almost definitely be deleted later but thanks if you got this far


End file.
